One of the cool things about living in Seattle is that this freak show of an airplane flew over me on my way home from work today. There is, of course a video of this beast on Boeing's web site. Who needs YouTube.

The first 747-400 Large Cargo Freighter, a specially modified fleet of airplanes that will transport the major components of the 787 Dreamliner, completed its first flight today. The airplanes are being modified by Evergreen Aviation Technologies Corp. (EGAT), a joint venture between General Electric and EVA Air. The second airplane will roll out this fall. The first two airplanes will begin ferrying components for the first Dreamliners in early 2007.

By now, most people have heard about how we 2-upped Google (Bird's Eye imagery being the 1-up) with the 3D imagery in our maps feature, and it was nice to see PC Magazine give us an Editor's Choice award.

For me, what this feature means is an easy way to "visit" the old home town. Most of the imagery is automatically created all the different data sources we have at our disposal, but in some cases, we hand-craft the results, and the results for the State House in Boston are great. Check out the flags.

The cool bird's-eye views were enough of a draw in the previous version, but the 3D is downright addictive. This probably would be enough to please most people even without the local search, maps, and wealth of extra features.

This is an interesting approach to toolbar distribution. This makes me want to go create a new search macro for Windows Live Search that will narrow search results to sites that cover issues of poverty and relief.

The ONE Toolbar allows you to participate in the ONE.org campaigns nationwide and specific to your congressional district. The ONE Toolbar enables you to exercise the Power of ONE and joining the Campaign to Make Poverty History.

I hate to find a cool band 6 years after their fisrt album, but thanks to URGE I've just spent the last couple hours listening to RiverTribe and getting very happy. I had a period of time last year where I was really into didgeridoo music, but I only knew two or three artists who featured the instrument (I'm from Boston - not much of a didge scene there) so the phase came and went, but it's back with a vengance now.

The most troublesome area in the world is South Asia, where 46 percent of children are underweight. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan account for half of the world's underweight children even though they have only 30 percent of the world's population of children under 5.

and...

In developing nations, only one in three children is breast-fed in the first six months of life, meaning they are deprived of crucial nutrients that stimulate their immune systems and protect them from respiratory infections, the report said.

I am part of a team at the Cambridge Vineyard church in Cambridge, MA that set up a fund to channel donations from members of the church to a set of charities chosen to cover a wide range of goals related to relief, opportunity and justice. Below is the description of the fund that we put together. So far, the biggest sticking point in setting this up has been the idea we had to choose funds for which there were significant connections through members of our church. For large organizations, this isn't so much of a problem since there is plenty of objective data to use in evaluating the effectiveness of the organization, but for small organizations, especially ones where the church member is a principal at the organization in question, we are dealing with some concerns about favoritism.

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Mission – Relief, Opportunity and Justice

The mission of the Partnership Fund is to empower the church to follow Christ's invitation to love the poor and oppressed. We want to do this by raising awareness and helping to end poverty, oppression and suffering through significant financial giving. The fund will pool our financial resources and partner with a range of effective, well-researched organizations to:

Provide relief from natural and man-made disasters

Raise people out of poverty through the provision of basic needs, skills, resources and opportunities

Fight against extreme injustice and promote basic human rights

How the Fund Works

The Partnership Fund is administered by a team of Cambridge Vineyard members who research organizations, monitor their effectiveness and decide on the timing and amount of disbursements. This team is chartered with finding the most effective organizations that are working towards the goals of the fund, and also taking the time to find new or under-resourced ministries where donations can have a high impact. The team will balance donations amongst local, state-wide, national and global organizations and amongst different areas of focus (i.e. basic life needs, housing, health care, education, economic/business development, etc.). Where possible, the team will use connections between church members and organizations to gain better insight into the organization’s activities and effectiveness and will research the underlying values of all organizations to ensure they are not in conflict with the values of our church.

Advantages

Donating to the Partnership Fund ensures that your money will be working towards fulfilling a comprehensive vision of short-term relief, long-term economic opportunity and the promotion of justice locally and throughout the world. Consolidating your giving will simplify your life at tax time and will raise the impact of your donation as we pool our funds to help the most effective organizations. All supporters will receive regular reports that will detail the amount each organization has received and updates on the status of each organization.

How to Give

Currently, the best way to donate money to the Partnership fund is to make out a check to the Cambridge Vineyard and specify “The Partnership Fund” in the memo line of your check. Since checks will be written out to the Cambridge Vineyard, all donations will be tax deductible.In the near future we will be adding online support for one-time and recurring donations with a credit card.

Learn More

If you would like to receive email updates on the activities of the Partnership Fund, send an email to thepartnershipfund@cambridgevineyard.org and we will add you to our list. If you have questions about the fund, contact Sebastian Gard at (781) 934- 5558. A list of the current organizations included in the fund and some basic information about those funds is available as a separate document.

"...one great tragedy of lymphatic filariasis (pronounced lim-FAT-tick fill-ahr-EYE-us-sis) is that it is not curable.

Still, it is one of a handful of diseases world health experts hope to eliminate within a generation, because its spread can be prevented with deworming drugs that can even be distributed in household salt, an approach that wiped out the disease in China.

But the task is daunting, not merely because 120 million people in 80 countries have the worms, but also because of the stigma and secret shame that the affliction causes, particularly in men, turning filariasis into a disease the world hardly knows. Even where it is endemic — 40 million people suffer its symptoms in the world's most downtrodden places — it is cloaked in ignorance and misunderstanding. "

Starting with the title, "The End Of Poverty," and ending with the author's close ties to an actual movement to do just that, there is a lot to like about this book. I have to admit that I never finished the whole thing, but having read most of it on the recommendation of a pastor at my church, I was inspired by the idea that it is possible to completely eliminate the most horrible kind of poverty in the world. The book strikes a good balance between describing the realities of extreme poverty with some key high-level statistics such as "more than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty" then drilling down into what that means in terms of famine, disease and poor medical services. Then, before you get depressed and check out, the author starts to talk about some success stories he's been involved in as an economic advisor, and then describes a framework for diagnosing the causes of poverty in different locations and taking appropriate "differential" action.

Mr. Sachs is closely associates with the UN's Millennium Development Goals which are a comprehensive set of goals for dealing with poverty by 2015. The first goal is related specifically to extreme poverty:

Goal 1 of the Millennium Development Goals sets out by the year 2015 to:

Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day.

Jeffrey D. Sachs's guided tour to the poorest regions of the Earth is enthralling and maddening at the same time -- enthralling, because his eloquence and compassion make you care about some very desperate people; maddening, because he offers solutions that range all the way from practical to absurd. It's a shame that Sachs's prescriptions are unconvincing because he is resoundingly right about the tragedy of world poverty.

All in all, I can't imagine a better debate to be going on than how to keep those 20,000 people alive each day.

UPDATE: It seems that Mr. Easterly has expanded his criticism of the aid establishment into a new book - The White Man's Burden. I haven't read this yet, but it is on it's way out of an Amazon warehouse as we speak. The funny thing about this all is that Amazon puts this book together with the Sach's book in one of their "Better Together" recommendations. That may be true of the books, but probably not of the authors.